Cross-Shopping at 9/10ths

Imagine striding into the local dealership, cornering the well-groomed salesperson and saying, "I'd really like to take your demo M3 on an extended high-speed test drive, to get a sense of its ultimate cornering ability, its chassis' lift-throttle reaction through repeated medium-speed sweepers, and its braking performance with maybe a half-dozen hard stops from 110 to 40 mph. When I return, the tires will be limp, smoldering casings, and curls of smoke will rise from brake rotors — themselves a shade of red not seen since Chernobyl — but otherwise the car should still be driveable." Or words to that effect.

Then, repeat the process at and dealerships.

"You want to do what!?" That salesperson would probably lose his Starbucks Venti through his nose. Yet this sort of evaluation is precisely the idea at Skip Barber's 1- and 2-day High Performance Driving Schools, where students get to wring out several top-rung German performance machines, which include the , and , and . Back-to-back drives are the attraction here, along with a first-class racetrack driving education, at a number of storied circuits across the country.

Although other venues are Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Lime Rock Park, Road America and Daytona International Speedway, our particular $2695 2-day school was held at Sebring, Florida, site of the historic 12-hour classic that's been a fixture on the endurance-racing scene since 1952.

It's hallowed ground, on a couple of levels. It's not difficult to imagine the ghosts of grimy, bug-splattered Lola T-70s, Ferrari 312PBs and Ford GT40s, forging on from surreal pastel sunset into darkness. Or to visualize, in 1942, a rookie B-17 pilot on lumbering final approach to one of Sebring's 300 x 5000-ft. concrete runways, as the place was originally Hendricks Field, a training base for crews of Boeing's Flying Fortress. For either racing slick or aircraft tire, this coarsely textured surface offers tremendous grip...and shows its age with every patch, crack and misaligned concrete slab.

"Tires last only about a third as long here as they do at other tracks," says Terry Earwood, Skip Barber's regional chief instructor whose impish mien and Blue Collar Comedy Tour delivery put some real spark in the physics talk that's essential for any driving school. He challenges our group with questions, punctuates points with his own special "wheelspin" sound effects, dispenses nuggets of wisdom (on minimizing understeer: "Don't add power to ugly") and in general has so much enthusiasm that everyone else appears to be on sedatives.

Then it's out to Sebring's paddock area, to the diabolical wet skidpad. Diabolical, because no two laps are the same, as the sealed-asphalt circle has varying levels of grip around its circumference. It's excellent car-control practice, however, as we're encouraged to play pitch-and-catch with the cars (here, ), with only tiny throttle or steering inputs needed to get the car rotating. "Catch the slide quickly; think 'Jackie Chan' when you move your hands!" urges instructor John Dean. Okay, so I'm more like Inspector Clouseau at first, but practice makes perfect.

Next up is a baseline autocross exercise, rotating among the star players — M3, 911 and S4; the RS 4 was out with a clutch fricasseed by an earlier student. Finally, a chance to put the power down, on a sort of amoeba-shaped 2nd-gear course with a fast kink and a long, decreasing-radius turn where we could trail-brake to our heart's content. Advantage here? The M3. The Porsche's gearing was too tall, and its power-on push hurt it exiting the really tight stuff; and the Audi simply carries too much weight over its front tires to be truly autocross-friendly.

There was a litany of other drills, again done in the featured cars: a lane-change maneuver, where the instructor flips on a green light in one of three lanes and the hapless student steers toward it at the last instant; an extended session of heel-toe downshifting practice, using enough speed for a 4th-3rd-2nd sequence; and more work on the wet skidpad ("Jackie Chan! Jackie Chan!"). But we came here to drive Sebring, right?

So we filed out onto a shortened version of the course in the time-honored lead/follow exercise, with the instructors showing us the line...and there are considerable options here, given the lateral expanses of this airport course's corners. The legendary bumpiness is there, quite acceptable in a production sports car, but no doubt responsible for countless CV joint, gearbox and control-arm failures in the heat of battle. As we were all journalists with some track experience, the instructors wicked it up quickly, and we discovered some "nuances" of the track. Like a suspension-eating chuckhole on Turn 17...keep the car 6 feet off the apex and you'll miss it. And the long, wicked-hairy-fast entry from the back straight into that turn complex, which requires a downshift, just-so trail-braking and pinpoint turn-in precision. Lots of free-form black tire marks attest to mistakes here. "In all my years of racing, I think I got it right twice," quips Earwood.

Here, the Porsche felt best, the understeer manageable, the tail stepping out ever so controllably with a gentle lift of the throttle. The seats fits me like a second skin, the pedal heights and spacing are a heel-and-toe dream, and the flat-6 revs ultra-quickly, as if its flywheel were of Styrofoam.

Your ultimate pick may contradict mine, but the fact-finding process for a counterargument has never been more exciting than two days under the Florida sun at a converted concrete airstrip.

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